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Why Everyone Should Hate Cellphone Carriers
The Byelorrusian Spamtrap writes "Wired Magazine's made its position clear on the state of play in America's cellular industry, delivering a long, satisfying screed on why all of us should stop complaining and do something about it. 'They own politicians - Sure, it's just phones. In a world where worse things happen all the time amid the muck and despair of human existence, having to pay for premium text is hardly worth worrying about, is it? You can (and should) opt out, and not sign on the dotted line to begin with. But today's cell towers might be tomorrow's Pony Express: they're TV stations, internet access, emergency 911 and news networks all rolled into one. WWAN could well end up supplanting copper sooner than anyone expects: do you want these companies in charge of it?'"
In a world where worse things happen all the time amid the muck and despair of human existence, having to pay for premium text is hardly worth worrying about, is it?
That depends. Are you paris hilton? If yes, then yes.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
[This comment paid for by the American Association of Mobile Telephone Operators]
Let me get this straight... polticians are corrupt, so we shouldn't buy cellphones? Am I reading that correctly? Politicians are corrupt... so in response... we punish ourselves by not using a very convenient technology. Are we really that apathetic? Is that what this country has come to?
HOW ABOUT PUNISH THE POLITCIANS!? I'm so sick of people repeatedly voting in incumbents, then whining about how things never change, and they're just all so corrupt. Vote for an independent, hell, write in yourself, but don't whine that you'd just be *wasting a vote*, and continue to support people who are not serving you! Then tell people they should live the life of a hermit to *stick it to the man*. It is NOT the corporations fault that they attempt to maximize profits. That is the job of a public company. Our government allowing them to do so through shady practices is a problem with the GOVERNMENT!
Since a lot of those same reasons can apply to ISPs and other companies in general, I propose we just hate all corporations whose profit margins are above 1 million annually. If we can assume that money corrupts, I think it's fair to say that any company in excess of $1,000,000.00 has doing something wrong to somebody on their way to that point. This blanket hatred will make it easier for me to keep track of what companies I do and don't like.
today's cell towers might be tomorrow's Pony Express
Probably not. While an exciting and deadly ride for its employees, the Pony Express was an abysmal failure as a business. It went bankrupt in just a matter of months as I recall. I see the cell phone companies neither providing exciting, deadly rides nor going out of business in a hurry.
I doubt carriers could suddenly gain control over all of these things, but it is something that needs to be avoided, however it may happen. The real reasons that would be a problem lie in their customer relations practices.
A billing error that can't be fixed at local stores, and the subscriber is forced to lead resolution of the issue while waiting on hold for 10 minutes every time an attempt is made, then arguing with customer "service" to convince them a problem exists. (AT&T)
Quality of tech support is laughable - I was told by a tech supervisor that data transfer on my phone was very expensive because the screen was large. Not just physically, but it had a high resolution too. (Cingular)
Salespeople lying directly to customers about plan availability when a similar plan with higher commission is available. (T-Mobile)
Seriously... how can you have a segment on "They have annoying commercials", and not even mention ATT/Cingular's "idk my bff [name]" commercials? They have the dubious honor of being some of the only commercials (Axe being the other one, for the curious) to make me feel like my iq was lowered just by watching it.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yeah, I think cell phone companies in America suck. What am I supposed to do about it? The author suggests not owning a phone at all. Well, I guess I would do that if I could get a land line. But wait, those are owned by the same companies. The only alternative is phone service through a cable/satellite company, but those companies are just as corrupt and dreadful as the cell phone companies (and in a lot of cases worse). Hell, the state of broadband in America is 100x worse than the state of cell phones, and there is literally nothing we can do about that. Cutting yourself off from the phone companies (a lesser evil) just bolsters cable/satellite companies (a greater evil). The only real solution is some sort of uprising. First senator that gets the ball rolling on fixing broadband (making it comparable to the rest of the world) gets my write-in vote for president.
While the general public is apathetic/oblivious of these issues, nothing will happen.
It seems to take about ten years for the general public to really get their heads around technical issues.
expandfairuse.org
Such futures can't be relied upon if innovation is permitted So, no company should invest heavily in innovation because that stifles progress. Check.
The remaining [author couldn't be bothered to count] reasons are similarly kvetching and dripping with angst.
Yeah, the cellular providers all totally suck ass, I must agree. However, what can we possibly do about it? Nothing, because the alternatives are worse than putting up with it.
Many/most of us require telephone communication. I for one can't simply go without telephone service, if I want to have a decent relationship with my wife and relatives, and if I want to be able to function in society and business and my job. When I finally ditched the landline back around 2002, I was paying about as much for a crappy landline from Qwest with no features as I did for a cellphone. Somehow I doubt this has changed much. I might be able to save a little money by getting a landline from Cox cable (since I already have internet service from them, after all), but then I'd miss out on the versatility that I and so many others have grown accustommed to with cellphones; it'd be a real pain to be out of contact while driving or shopping, in the lab where I work, etc. The few extra dollars per month for cell service is worth it to me.
Am I jealous that people in other countries get far better and freer cellular service than me, for much less money? Sure! But there just aren't any alternatives here.
Until something else comes along that offers a real alternative, I don't see the point in saying "we should do something about it", because we can't. Cellular service isn't like writing open-source software: it requires not just phones, but a network consisting of central offices, antenna towers, fiber-optic lines, and billions of dollars worth of equipment and infrastructure. The cellular providers are just following the Golden Rule: "he who has the gold makes the rules", and our stupid government isn't bothering to regulate them to prevent them from acting so poorly.
Maybe eventually some brilliant quantum physicist will come up with a way for us to all communicate using "subspace" or whatever, so with the proper equipment we can just establish point-to-point communications with whomever we please, with no need for any infrastructure or middle-man like these cellular providers, and no worries about having to share limited spectrum. But until then, or until some other alternative is found, or until our government steps in and regulates them (yeah right), we're stuck.
I fully expect that these companies will wind up "in charge" of it by fiat if nothing else. It's only a matter of time. Like the article said, these companies own Congress. Well, Congress makes laws that govern "interstate commerce" (which the courts have interpreted as shorthand for, basically, any damned thing they please), so Congress can, and will, do the equivalent of declaring them as being the sole carriers for this stuff if the competition keeps them from taking that role otherwise.
Didn't you get the memo about what fascism is really all about?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Some of the reasons that people hate cell phone companies have to do with the abusive service contracts which are difficult or impossible to get out of. One way to avoid this is to buy a GSM cell phone with a US SIM chip. This has a side advantage that you can easily use the phone overseas by buying a SIM chip for the country you're visiting. You buy prepaid cards for these phones. Calling is a little more expensive, but you don't have a contract to deal with. There is also much less information about you as a cell phone user, since the only way to track you back to your phone is through the company you bought it from.
In theory if more people used GSM phones and phone cards, there would be more competition since the cell providers can't lock you in to a contract. This is, by the way, the situation in Europe where GSM is the standard.
Has anyone considered that the excessively long voicemail introductions used by almost every cell carrier amount to conspired gouging? We pay airtime when we are leaving a voicemail, right? When you get voicemail on my cell you get my brief away message, followed by the phone company's useless 20-second blather. For example:
ring... ring... ring... (me):"Hello, I'm not here right now, please leave a message" (sprint): "To leave a voice message press 1, or just wait for the tone. To send a numeric page press 2 now. At the tone please leave a voice message. When you are finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options"
Several gripes here.
1) 20 seconds of instructions doesn't sound like that much on its own. But if that pushes your phone call to roll one minute longer it's a minute of possible airtime charge the phone company gets. You start paying the minute the call is answered, even leaving voicemail.
2) A typical voicemail message is probably 2 minutes or less. The phone company's instructional message here is taking up a significant portion of that airtime.
3) These instructions are ridiculous and seem to be there only to draw out the duration of the call. They couldn't be phrased more verbosely. Oh, I can hang up when the message is done? I didn't know that. I can press pound for more options? How about you tell me about those AFTER I've left a message.
4) The features are really ridiculous, too, and I suspect some 1% even use them. Send a numeric page? Why the hell should I do that? Cellphones have caller ID already. Send a FAX?? Please Slashdotters tell me who has sent a FAX over a cellphone. Do you have to make the modem sounds with your voice? If anyone DOES use these features they probably don't need the help message to remember what button to press to initiate their cellphone fax.
5) There is no option to turn these messages off. They probably also require you to add your own greeting. Resulting in a totally redundant 30-second prelude to leaving any voicemail.
6) Every mobile company I know of has these messages, some worse than others. Is this an unspoken or conspired arrangement between the mobile carriers? Sprint doesn't necessarily make money when someone has to listen to their God-awful pre-message, but they might. They certainly will make money when my Sprint phone is waiting on Verizon's equally obnoxious introduction, or T-mobile's, etc...
7) The worst part of this, in my perspective, isn't that I might pay, if I totally screw up, 50c or 5 bucks some month because a few extra minutes were incurred waiting to leave my friends voicemail - or dropping coffee on the bus trying to press 1 to bypass the spiel. The worst part is I leave a moderate amount of voicemail messages, and this amounts to Minutes, Hours, or God knows, even Days of my life eventually wasted listening to a robot tell me how to leave a voicemail and that it's ok to hang up. It's robbery, I tell you!
Today: Anonymous prepaid
- buy a pre-activated T-mobile 2 Go SIM off of ebay
- buy an unlocked GSM phone off ebay
No contracts, no fees, no lame choice of stupid phones, nobody knows who you are or how to hassle you. You put minutes on the SIM card and that's that.
This is the "plan" my wife and I have been on since May. Works nicely. Some friends just asked me to set them up with the same deal, since they were sick of paying $90/mo for a set of phones they barely used.
Tomorrow:
Replace handset you bought in "step A" wth an openMoko device. My next handset will hopefully be 100% open-source. I can get partway there with the P2k tools and what not for Motorola, but a truly open device just makes it all that much easier.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The REAL question we should be asking is why are none of the companies willing to step up and offer better, cheaper plans? In a free market, we would have the same plans (if not better) as the Europeans do. Businesses undercut each other in a free market in order to steal customers. So why are no cell phone companies doing this? Don't we have laws that are supposed to prevent companies from banding together to screw the consumer? I was under the assumption that price-fixing was against the law (and is clearly what's going on; the cell phone companies have agreed to offer minimal features for similar prices, so everyone gets part of the pie without any real competition)
So the issue is how to get out of the current muddle and to cut ties with these carriers. Of course, we can use Skype or various IM and video conferencing tools to talk to people without making a traditional landline or mobile call. The coming deployment of WiMAX networks will increase our ability to use IP-based devices for calling.
The forthcoming FCC auction of the 700MHz spectrum, now scheduled for January, will introduce more openness into the bidding process, and should enable a company such as Google to develop a competing service. Assuming that happens, there will be an alternative our dependence on the incumbent carriers, which will have its ups (price, flexibility) and possible downs (advertising, privacy concerns).
There are also numerous efforts underway to create devices based on open source software. The Nokia N800/N810 http://www.nseries.com/ is a Linux-based device with a useful developer site http://www.maemo.org/. The OpenMoko project http://www.openmoko.org/ is aimed at developing an open source phone. These devices are, of course, unlocked. When OpenMoko has advanced a little further, you should be able to take anyone's SIM chip, put it in your OpenMoko phone, and make a call. For now, though, the best you can do is to have an unlocked phone. (I have about 8 SIM chips from different countries, and switch them when I travel, thereby avoiding the extortionate international roaming charges of the mobile carriers. You can easily buy "pay-as-you-go" service almost everywhere, including in the US.)
So we can already take various steps to loosen our ties to the cellphone carriers. With some luck, many of us will be able to extricate ourselves completely. It's only then that the cellphone carriers will feel the need to improve their products and services to attract and retain customers.
You sounds like someone who's single and lives in his parent's basement. No offense; I used to be single too.
Personally, my wife places a lot of value on being able to reach me any time she has an important question or concern, whether I'm shopping, at work (I'm not always next to my desk phone), etc.
Many people have jobs which require them to have cell phones and be on-call. Obviously, you don't have such a job, but don't deride people who do, and tell them they don't need a cellphone, because that would get them fired.
Most people require telephone service of some kind for the daily lives, even if it's not a cellphone. Guess what? The landline companies are the same evil companies that provide cellular service, so you're not getting away from them by using a landline. Do you go without a phone altogether? Most people with jobs don't have that luxury. I certainly don't.
"the internet" isn't like subspace; it's a shared infrastructure just like that provided by cellular providers. How do you access the internet? Do you use a pringle's can and steal from your nearby Starbuck's? Most people have to pay for internet access, and this usually means using another big, evil company like Qwest, Cox, Comcast, Verizon, etc. So you're not getting away from these companies by using the internet either.
So unless you have some way of keeping in touch with family and business partners which doesn't involve using a big, evil company like one of those above (and you live in the USA, as this discussion is irrelevant elsewhere), then you're completely missing the point and your argument is invalid.
While I sit here and defend the obvious, I do not own a cell phone, and probably never will again. I realized that I REALLY don't need one. If you sit down and think about it, 90% of you probably don't either.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Bah, I've been an advocate of "sharing the love" for a long time.
Buy a Broadband connection, then put a WIFI router on your main router's DMZ and let the folks know that service might be intermittent, but they can hit that router for (or negotiate a group rate with friends and neighbors, you maintain the power bill and the hardware and keep the big public WIFI router on a DMZ, etc.)
If every neighbor in the area with broadband provides a WIFI network (I even put up a SQUID cache server in the old days) you can actually provide "municipal" wifi without needing the government to get involved.
If you get to KNOW your neighbors before letting them have the WIFI WPA access key, then you can truly "secure" your network by knowing, A, who's logged in, and B, whom it is that you're sharing your data with.
And technically, you can do whatever you damn please with the connection, especially if you run a cache server to keep things clear. Discussing other features (such as data retention policy or lack thereof, etc, will help keep things honest...) I have known of NO endeavors ever done by big corporations (child of government) or the government itself that has EVER been honest, whether here in North America, or anywhere else.
To believe that gov'co ever does ANYTHING without having ulterior motives, is to be starkly and childishly naive.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
The GSM networks are indeed more limited (T-Mobil and Cingular are the ones I've accessed) and the reception is not as good perhaps. However, you can buy very reasonably priced unlocked phones. I bought an unlocked from from Telestial in San Diego three years ago. I think that it cost around $100 US. I've used it in Spain, and twice in Italy. I now have a US SIM chip for it. I feed it T-Mobil cards every once in a while.
I hope you're able to take care of that smoke coming out of the ears problem. It sounds painful.
That's a great idea until an FBI agent is standing on your neck when they track down illegal activity to your connection. I'm not trying to be cynical because I really do think your idea is great. However, I have a hard time believing the government will buy (or even understand) all the precautions you are taking when they find out someone is snarfing kiddie porn through your wireless.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Well of course the telcos are buying people out. That's entirely why they torpedoed municiple wifi: they are more and more being forced into the role of "dumb pipes"...
Actually it's 'tubes'.